In this introductory episode of the JCO Precision Oncology Conversations podcast, host Dr. Abdul Rafeh Naqash, MD, from the University of Oklahoma Stephenson Cancer Center, speaks with JCO Precision Oncology’s founding Editor in Chief, Dr. James Ford, MD, of Stanford University. Dr. Naqash and Dr. Ford discuss how JCO Precision Oncology (JCO PO) started as a journal and how it has progressed since its launch in 2017. Dr. Ford dives into numerous JCO PO areas of interest, including liquid biopsy, genomics, biostatistics, and JCO PO-offered opportunities like the editorial fellowship program.

GUEST BIO
Dr. James Ford, MD, founding Editor in Chief of JCO Precision Oncology, received his MD degree from Yale University School of Medicine. He is currently Professor of Medicine (Oncology) and Genetics at Stanford University, and Director of the Stanford Cancer Genetics Clinic and the Cancer Genomics Program at the Stanford University Medical Center."

TRANSCRIPT

Dr. Abdul Rafeh Naqash: Welcome to ASCO’s JCO Precision Oncology Conversations, where we bring you the highlights and overview of precision oncology. Episodes will feature engaging conversations with authors of clinically relevant and highly significant articles in JCO Precision Oncology. These articles can be accessed at ascopubs.org/Journal/PO.

Hi, my name is Dr. Abdul Rafeh Naqash and you are listening to the JCO Precision Oncology Conversations podcast. Today, I will be talking with Dr. James Ford, about JCO Precision Oncology. Dr. Ford is the editor-in-chief for JCO Precision Oncology. It's great to have you here today, Dr. Ford.

Dr. James Ford: Thanks, Rafeh, so much for hosting me and for running this podcast series. I think it's going to be great for the journal and for our audience.

Dr. Abdul Rafeh Naqash: Thank you so much, Dr. Ford. For the sake of our audience, could you introduce yourself with respect to your interest in medicine, oncology, and precision medicine specifically?

Dr. James Ford: Sure! Well, I'm a physician-scientist, I trained at Stanford in medical oncology in genetics, and have spent my whole career here over 30 years. So, currently, I'm a professor of medicine in the division of oncology and genetics.

I have focused my scholarly activities on cancer genetics and run a lab that's worked mostly in the field of DNA repair, and of course, this has evolved through the era of discovering and taking advantage of the fact that DNA damage response genes have turned out to be excellent targets for therapy in cancer. And so, this really combined my interest in the genetics of cancer and in targeting those biomarkers for therapy, which really has become the field of precision oncology.

So, I run the Molecular Tumor Board here at Stanford and our Hereditary Cancer Genetics Program. So, that's really led to my interest in understanding both hereditary and somatic cancer genetics, and how we can use new targeted therapies to take advantage of understanding those biomarkers.

Dr. Abdul Rafeh Naqash: Thank you so much for letting our audience know about all the work that you've done. You've definitely have been a leader in this field of cancer genomics and precision medicine.

Talking about the intersection of where your interests met with starting JCO Precision Oncology, could you tell us since this is one of the sentinel episodes for our podcast series, could you elaborate on how you decided to start JCO Precision Oncology as a journal? And what was your vision of how you would shape the journal as it continued to progress over the subsequent years?

Dr. James Ford: Sure! Well, the credit really goes to ASCO for the vision to start this journal about 6 or 7 years ago. ASCO decided to start adding some sister journals to its very successful flagship journal, the Journal of Clinical Oncology. And one of those, it was decided that an area, burgeoning area of interest that would be useful to our community is around precision oncology. And so, they launched a search release for a founding editor for what was named then JCO Precision Oncology, and I was fortunate enough to be chosen to be that founding editor.

So, the journal started publishing just 5 years ago, right about now, this is our 5th anniversary, really, with the goal of focusing on research and reports, particularly around the clinical use of profiling tumors in individuals, as a way to advance therapies as a general scope.

So, this was to add to the value that JCO, the parent journal, already has in thinking about this field that's taking advantage of n-of-1 study or of sometimes small series of studies because of the rarity of some of these genomic changes. So, scientific advances that we can take advantage of clinically, that perhaps don't fit into the traditional large phase three randomized study that reached the level of JCO, or some other journals. And I think we've seen since starting that this really has addressed an excellent niche in the field and allowed an area to publish really excellent research that doesn't always fit into some of the other journals.

So, I guess the first step really then 5 years ago, 5-6 years ago, when we started this journal, was really with the truly excellent staff at ASCO and JCO, which helped launch this journal to put together our initial associate editors and board of editors, which I think truly has been one of the best parts of this whole general experience. We have the leaders in the younger generation of cancer therapy researchers and oncologists focused on precision oncology, all gathered together in this journal. And it's actually one of the most fun things about doing this is working with this great group.

Of course, we've been adding to that over the years, but really, our initial core group has stayed with us. And together with the great staff and all the reviewers that have helped with this really started to put a focus on the sorts of papers and the kind of areas that it's really useful for us to publish them.

Dr. Abdul Rafeh Naqash: Definitely, as you mentioned, Dr. Ford, the success of a journal, like JCO PO involves a large team that works behind the scene, including yourself and many others, as well as the reviewers who do their due diligence in helping us get the right content out there.

So, you mentioned about your interest in DNA damage and you mentioned about your interest in cancer genomics. Based on how you have seen this whole field evolve, what is your understanding of how we can incorporate more and more precision medicine from an early therapeutics’ standpoint and also from a standard of care standpoint? Where do you see all that going from a testing standpoint, as well as a clinical application standpoint?

Dr. James Ford: Well, I think one of the really interesting aspects of the tenure of this journal has been moving from what still is and largely was a research-based approach to cancer therapeutics using genomic and other types of molecular profiling of tumors to try to select therapies in the best way for individual patients to taking that to hopefully becoming standard of care, a better understanding how to apply that to certain individual patients, as well as have groups of patients, how to best use genomic biomarkers, and how to best encourage the development of new targeted cancer therapies for that type of use.

So, I think an exciting aspect has been also profiling new clinical trial methods, and new biostatistical ways of looking at this kind of data that can't always be done in traditional large randomized trials – how to advance the field clinically, based on really the incredible technological underpinnings of the field.

And so, that's required, I think, some novel and different ways of looking at and publishing data. So, of course, we are publishing original reports of excellent science, often based on preclinical findings, but always trying to find those that certainly have applications to the clinic and preferably have been tried in the clinic and shown advancements that we can take advantage of, but also, I think, importantly, has been publishing case reports, and other ways of highlighting smaller successes in the field that can lead to further larger clinical investigations. And as you know, it's hard to find journals and places where that can be published.

Of course, we're quite restrictive in the kind of case reports we publish, we want to do those that have really high educational value or high predictive value for future clinical use. But I think precision oncology is one area of medicine, where looking at individual cases can be very revealing for future clinical benefit.

Another thing we're doing and we founded was a series of what we call molecular tumor boards, and that really is just a description of a case or cases that are written from a Molecular Tumor Board group and describes the process of using very complicated genomic test reports and expertise from a number of physicians and scientists in interpreting that to best try to advance the therapy for a patient or group of patients. And I think that helps show to clinicians the value of a molecular tumor board or this kind of approach to analyzing both the lab-based genomic data and clinical experience and use of molecular pathology and pathologist experience, to synthesize these kinds of cases, and I think these have been very revealing as well and useful to the literature.

Dr. Abdul Rafeh Naqash: Absolutely! I completely agree with you. And based on everything that you mentioned JCO Precision Oncology has definitely had a lot of significant and important submissions that have come out, and as our viewers might know, we have our most recent impact factor which is close to 5.5. So, congratulations to you Dr. Ford, and I guess the rest of the team that worked behind the scene for accomplishing this.

Do you have any additional thoughts on anything that the listeners should know on the kind of content that you'd be interested in getting submissions for over the next 6 months to a year so that we have an understanding from the listeners of what kind of content is most acceptable like you mentioned earlier?

Dr. James Ford: Sure! Well, as I said, we publish a number of types of articles, obviously, original scholarly reports and investigations, case reports, Molecular Tumor Board discussions, editorials, and commentaries on papers in our journal or others or areas in the field that are interesting.

I think we have a healthy dialogue happening in the journal with discussions and responses from authors regarding papers we publish. This is an online journal and so we really try to publish in real-time and have an interactive forum for that. So, of course, anyone is welcome to submit ideas or commentaries on areas in the field that we think are important or should be advanced. So, we serve as a forum for that discussion as well as publishing traditional articles.

I would say something that we've tried to focus on and we'll continue to do so is every year having one or several particular areas of interest that we're recruiting articles or commentaries, review articles about.

Over the last couple of years, for example, we had a series very much focused on liquid biopsies and how the use of circulating tumor DNA is really revolutionizing precision oncology. We had a wonderful set of articles from our biostats editor, Ying Lu, on new biostatistical approaches to clinical trials in the area of precision oncology, thinking about the particular needs in that area.

I think in the next year or so, we are launching a series right now on the use of genomic profiling, molecular profiling in earlier-stage cancer, and how to use that information for choosing or defining the correct adjuvant therapy in early cancers or using it before the metastatic setting, trying to move the process up. Is it appropriate? Where should it be used? How best to use that? It is quite an open area that I think we're going to make great advances on in the next few years.

I think an area of great interest is how to think about combining targeted therapies in a precision oncology approach. How do you test preclinically? And then, of course, clinically, multiple agents together to take advantage of genomic biomarkers to advance therapies and how to test that in the clinic which is, of course, a great challenge. How to rationally pick those agents that we think might provide synergy.

Of course, an area of great interest for everybody is thoughts around diversity, equity, and inclusion in clinical medicine in general, but for us, specifically, in best understanding genetics and genomics of diverse populations, how to be most inclusive in our clinical trial process, and testing of these approaches. And I think we've had a number of very thoughtful articles in this space and encourage more in this area as well.

Dr. Abdul Rafeh Naqash: Thank you so much. Those are all amazing things that the journal is trying to implement. All those topics that you mentioned are extremely important and very interesting as far as precision medicine goes.

Shifting gears a little bit. Dr. Ford, could you tell us about the JCO Precision Oncology Editorial Fellowship? As you know, I am a product of that editorial fellowship, where I was paired with Dr. Rodrigo Dienstmann, and it was an amazing experience.

For the sake of our listeners, early career investigators, fellows, could you tell us a little bit about what this fellowship is and how that integrates into how we are trying to shape JCO Precision Oncology and the next generation of precision medicine specialists?

Dr. James Ford: Sure! Well, I think this has been a really exciting and fun area for the journal. And in fact, for all the ASCO journals. ASCO instituted a fellowship program several years ago, in which mostly senior fellows, and junior faculty members in related fields, apply to work with one of the journals over the course of a year.

And so, for the past several years, we've been fortunate enough to have two editorial fellows assigned to JCO PO that have worked with our associated editors throughout the process, really to learn how to not only review and manage manuscript submissions, but to best think about some of the issues we've been talking about like, how to show tape the direction of a journal, how to think about what are the most important areas in a field that we want to highlight, and hopefully can support. And it's been a great experience. We the editors have loved working with the fellows, really all of the fellows have gone on and continued in this field in academics across the country, and across the world, and a number have gone on to continue working with the journal like you, Rafeh.

It's been terrific, as our audience knows. And you mentioned you were a fellow and now joined the journal as part of the editorial staff to run this whole social media program. And a number of our other fellows have joined the editorial board and continue to work with us and to really contribute to the field.

So, I think that program has not only been really helpful to the folks who participated in it but to the field and to our journal in developing new talent and recruiting them to the field, so, very successful!

We've even taken another step in the journals towards this and the board of editors themselves are serving as mentors to other folks and mostly fellows in medical oncology and related fields, simply to learn how to become better reviewers of papers, and go through that process with a little guidance from the editorial group. And of course, this really helps us to deepen our pool of expert reviewers and referees for journals. So, I think this process has been iterative and very beneficial to the journal.

Dr. Abdul Rafeh Naqash: Definitely, I totally connected with that, Dr. Ford, as you mentioned, I was a JCO PO editorial fellow, worked with Dr. Dienstmann and yourself, and it led to subsequent interactions and roles within JCO PO, which has been amazing.

I would definitely encourage all the listeners, whoever is interested in applying, if they fit the eligibility criteria to definitely apply, to the ASCO Editorial Fellowship, especially JCO Precision Oncology, given my bias towards the journal.

It was amazing talking to you, Dr. Ford. Do you have any closing thoughts on what our listeners should be expecting as far as the journal or any other suggestions that you have for potential submissions out there, any other thoughts that you would like to share with our audience?

Dr. James Ford: Well, thanks, Rafeh, for having me and for conducting this interview. It's been a pleasure to talk about the journal. I would conclude by saying that this has been a great experience for me, and I think our whole editorial group, to start and to develop this journal, and really see how both it can grow itself and how I think it contributes to the growth of the field and serve as a nidus for our field in exchanging information and developing new ideas and thoughts that can benefit our patients.

So, I just would like to thank all of our group, our reviewers, and certainly the authors and folks that have submitted articles and ideas to the journal. I think it's making a difference. And I think the field, in general, is at a very exciting point and is making a difference for patient care, and will continue to do so with new technologies and new therapies and new ways to incorporate those. So, I think we've shown that this has been a useful journal for the field and I think I'm very excited about where things are going to go.

Dr. Abdul Rafeh Naqash: Thank you so much. I completely echo your thoughts. I would like to encourage the listeners to stay tuned for subsequent author conversations, and other interactive conversations that we'll have on our JCO Precision Oncology Conversations podcast, subsequently. Thank you so much for joining us today, Dr. Ford.

Dr. James Ford: Thank you.

Dr. Abdul Rafeh Naqash: Thank you for listening to JCO Precision Oncology Conversations. You can find all our shows, including this one, at asco.org/podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

To stay up to date, be sure to follow and share JCO PO content on Twitter. The Twitter handle is @JCOPO_ASCO. All JCO PO articles and series can be found at ascopubs.org/Journal/PO.

The purpose of this podcast is to educate and inform. This is not a substitute for professional medical care and is not intended for use in the diagnosis or treatment of individual conditions.

Guests on this podcast express their own opinions, experience, and conclusions. Guest statements on the podcast do not express the opinions of ASCO. The mention of any product, service, organization, activity or therapy should not be construed as an ASCO endorsement.

Disclosures

Dr. James Ford’s institution receives research funding from Genentech, AstraZeneca, Puma Biotechnology, Pfizer, Merus, Bayer, and Incyte.

Introducing JCO Precision Oncology and Its Editor in Chief, Dr. James Ford

JCO Precision Oncology Conversations